The global future of the internet is mobile Photograph: BBC World Service Trust

International press trade organisations find hope in the rising circulations of newspapers in India and other developing nations, declaring that print is alive and healthy after all.

As if the internet were not there, too.

Yes, print circulations are rising as literacy and economies and thus middle classes grow. But it would be foolish to think that the impact of the internet is not universal. Wise Indian publishers and editors I've met know that well.

But the internet of the West is not necessarily the internet of developing nations or of tomorrow. That internet is, of course, mobile.

Mobile devices will bring the net its next three billion users. Mobile is also how youth in the West are online. A Pew survey just released said that a quarter of America teens use mobile as their essentially their only path to the net. They, too, are post-computer.

So if we want to see how we will connect to the net tomorrow, we would be wise to look to India, China, and especially net-crazed Brazil as well as South Korea. Now we have heard this before, as American prognosticators predicted we would all eventually act like mobile-mad Japan, texting novels on our numeric keypads. That didn't happen because desktops and then laptops, not WAP phones, took America and Europe online.

But now there is a commonality of platform or at least a shared confusion about it. In every nation we are getting online through a dazzling choice of device sizes with 3-, 4-, 5-, 7-, 8-, 10-, 11-, 13-, and 15-inch screens. Where is the line that separates mobile from not?

Does it matter? Perhaps not. Rather than thinking about how we as editors and publishers and broadcasters feed our one-size-fits-all content through smaller or larger screens, we should realize that mobile is actually a means of changing our relationship with the public, from serving them as a mass to serving them as individuals.

That may sound like an impossibly daunting task in a nation such as India, where the scale is unthinkably large in the eyes of ever-smaller Western media. How can a company serve millions and tens of millions of people knowing them as people?

Facebook does it, serving more than a billion people with a staff the size of a single metropolitan newspaper, which today may serve a few hundred thousand. Google does it by giving us services that enable it to learn more about us and thus serve each of us with greater relevance and value. That is why Google is in the phone business. Android and its apps are signal generators about us, telling Google who we are, where we're going, where we've been, what we want....

I'm not suggesting that publishers should go into the phone business, but they can use this ever-more-ubiquitous technology to reset their relationship with the people we now know as unique users without names.

One example: More than a decade ago, I tried to push the idea that people with their mobile phones could provide the best live traffic data to each other. The media and traffic-information companies I spoke with rolled their eyes: "This isn't what we do", they said. Today, it exists in services such as Waze, a mobile platform that gathers and shares current traffic data from tens of millions of drivers.

If publishers had attempted to provide such a service using available technology, they would have learned valuable signals about users -- namely, where they live and work -- and would have been able to use that to serve each user with relevant content. They also would have learned how to create platforms that enable members of the public to share what they know with each other, creating tremendous value at very low cost. Instead, it's Google Now that knows where I live and work and tells me each day how long it will take me to get from one to the other, serving me recommendations and ads for restaurants at either end.

If newspaper trade organizations find hope in the rising circulation in India and the rest of BRIC, I find hope instead in the mobile usage that allows innovators there to leapfrog the big-screen thinking around me and reimagine what news and information platforms can be. I come to India hoping for inspiration.

About us

Guardian Professional Networks are community-focused sites, where we bring together advice, best practice and insight from a wide range of professional communities. Click here for details of all our networks. Some of our specialist hubs within these sites are supported by funding from external companies and organisations. All editorial content is independent of any sponsorship, unless otherwise clearly stated. We make Partner Zones available for sponsors' own content. Guardian Professional is a division of Guardian News & Media.